Friday, September 14, 2012

Crisis management training is the centre of crisis preparedness. All businesses and organisations need specific training to build a crisis response capability. Training reduces the potential for panic, chaos and confusion and focuses a crisis team on the components of a successful response.

The objective of a crisis management workshop is to enable crisis management team members to understand the basic principles of crisis management and its application within the organisation. A good program is designed to review the crisis management plan, team roles and responsibilities, threats and responses and should cover the following:

·Discuss how to communicate best with stakeholders, employees, customers, media, community, etc.

·Technology and equipment:where does the crisis team meet and what essential technology and equipment do they need?

·Log keeping and documentation:confirm document control and efficiency program for retaining information.

·Test and evaluate:Using typical threat, team provides discussion on how they would respond to the crisis using the learnings.

Case studies of past crises provide important insights, background and experience. They give the team an opportunity to observe the way in which successful and unsuccessful crisis response has been handled, at the same time as evaluating how recovery was instigated.

The workshop in most cases should be first conducted at the organisation’s Head Office with the Crisis Management TeamAs with all the training units in the crisis management plan, it should then be rolled out to regional and divisional business units, operations and sites.In some cases at smaller sites, the workshop may involve teams of two or three people, but they can still carry out threat identification and the responses to their unique situation.

Don't leave crisis management training until after an event occurs. Get in front and do it now.

About Me

Ross Campbell is Principal and CEO of RCA Crisis Management, a crisis management consulting firm specialising in response strategies and pre-crisis training for many global companies and government. With his team of specialist consultants, he trains hundreds of CEOs and executives at head offices and sites. He is author of CRISIS CONTROL - PREVENTING AND MANAGING CORPORATE CRISES (published by Penguin).